Review of Reamde by Neal Stephenson

The perfect book to read during my covid experience...engaging and exciting but not at all emotionally demanding. This is a multi-threaded action thriller, with lots of characters and fantastic settings. It's huge, and I had a hardback that I had bought years ago but never got round to reading, partly because it always seemed so daunting to put in a backpack. But it was a fantastic bedside read. 

It's set against a background of cod-medieval MMPRGs like World of Warcraft, Russian cybercriminals, Chinese game farmers, smugglers, American gun nuts, jihadis...really, lots. And it's done so deftly, so that the characters don't feel like caricatures but are easy to keep track of - there are really lots, so that's important. I particularly like the wisecracking Afro-Welsh jihadi bad guy Abdallah Jones.

No need to elaborate more. There's a lot of guns and violence, and by the end it was all getting a bit much for me, but it's a very enjoyable read. I've just discovered there's a sequel, with some of the same characters and others crossing over from his other book Cryptonomicon, and I know that it's inevitable that I'll read it.